Cruel Human Vermin Prowl And Growl In Edinburgh

December 4, 1999|By STEPHEN HOLDEN The New York Times

The operating philosophy of the Scottish slum dwellers who growl, spit, curse and brawl through Paul McGuigan's nastily amusing film, The Acid House, could be boiled down to a single acerbic slogan: It's kind to be cruel.

Becoming inured at an early age to the human savagery at the bottom of the social ladder is the only way to survive the meanness and degradation so flamboyantly exhibited in these three vignettes evoking the lower depths of North Edinburgh.

Based on the short stories of Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, The Acid House covers the same milieu and has a similar view of humans as hyper-stimulated vermin scuttling avidly through the trash heap of life.

In the opening vignette, "The Granton Star Cause," Boab Coyle (Stephen McCole), a shiftless, soccer-obsessed slob who lives with his parents and works at a dead-end job, has the grimy rug of his existence pulled out from under him. In a matter of hours, he is arrested and beaten up by a policeman, dismissed from his job, dumped by his girlfriend and tossed out of his parents' house.

Moping in a bar, Boab is approached by a scuffy stranger claiming to be God (Maurice Roeves), who berates him for his wasted life and turns him into a house fly. As Boab buzzes noisily through his previous haunts, he takes poisonous revenge against his persecutors.

The second vignette, "A Soft Touch," follows the disastrous marriage of Johnny (Kevin McKidd) and his pregnant, slatternly wife, Catriona (Michelle Gomez), who has slept with most of the male guests at their wedding. When a cocky new neighbor, Larry (Gary McCormack), moves in next door, he initiates a flagrant affair with the voracious Catriona. The vignette views Johnny with the same sadistic scorn as Catriona and Larry, who in the story's most sickening scene beat up the poor sap just for kicks.

Finally, there's the goofy title story, about an exchange of souls between Coco Bryce (Ewen Bremner), an LSD-imbibing layabout, and the newborn baby of a middle-class couple, Rory (Martin Clunes) and Jenny (Jemma Redgrave).

As Coco languishes in a state of pre-natal idiocy tended by his doting fiancee, Kirsty (Arlene Cockburn), the lascivious demon child inside Jenny's newborn baby curses and chortles as she tenderly suckles him.

If The Acid House, which opened Friday at the Gaetway Cinema in Fort Lauderdale, is as flashy a piece of work as Trainspotting, it lacks its forerunner's sociological depth. With a cackling nihilistic glee, the movie rubs our faces in the stinking, screaming muck of raw human appetite and insists that that's all there is.

Sex is violent and sadomasochistic, childbirth a living hell and tenderness a self-deluded sentimentality. Maybe so. But the movie overplays its hand. Once you get the joke, about a third of the way through, the joke is gotten.